Cleveland Sports Forum

Bartolo Colon signs with the Oakland A's. I guess it'll be fun to see if he can throw with any success while I have A's baseball on at night after Tribe games.

I just watched Moneyball on On Demand with my wife.

No one here warned me that a seemingly about 7 of the first 15 minutes involved an actor playing Cleveland's inimitable Mark Shap I Roh........


It was a good watch, though my view is that Cleveland "was played" in that film.

Did Billy Beane really lure an Ivy Leaguer from Shapiro to set up his "moneyball" machine?

I personally caught three games of "The Streak," including two with my wife that caused her to give me license to watch all the baseball I care to watch.

According to CBS Sports' Jon Heyman, the Rangers and Indians have expressed interest in Ryan Spilborghs.
Spilborghs has failed to attract much free agent interest after being non-tendered by the Rockies in mid-December. But perhaps that will now change. The 32-year-old outfielder batted just .210/.283/.305 with three home runs and 22 RBI across 223 plate appearances in 2011, but he's shown more ability than that in the past.

Related: Indians, Rangers
Source: Jon Heyman on Twitter Jan 16 - 8:39 AM

Keep scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Someone beat us to Jason Michaels in a signing I noted last week. I didn't know he was still playing.

No one here saw Moneyball, yet?

With the opening premise of Mark Shapiro getting fleeced of even the brains in his organization for the benefit of Brad Pitt as Billy Beane?

No opinions, or jabs?

Come on.


Get in shape.


Pitchers and catchers report in a month.

Moneyball borrowed from Major League, right down to that "he'll figure something out" line.

I've had to figure a few things out since I first watched Major League in a Marriott in Newport, Rhode Island in 1989.

So far, so good.

I believe in Baseball, and the coming spring, and The Beauty of Baseball.

Tribe Fan in SC/Cali wrote:No one here saw Moneyball, yet?

With the opening premise of Mark Shapiro getting fleeced of even the brains in his organization for the benefit of Brad Pitt as Billy Beane?

No opinions, or jabs?

Come on.


Get in shape.


Pitchers and catchers report in a month.

You are a few years behind on Moneyball. Most read excerpts or the entire book when it came out.

Jim Ingraham: 'Moneyball' is entertaining, but not accurate, Shapiro says
Published: Tuesday, October 11, 2011

By Jim Ingraham
JIngraham@News-Herald.com



Moneyball?

Funnyball.

Indians president Mark Shapiro is more amused than upset by what he calls the "fictional" depiction of himself and the Indians' organization in the recently released movie "Moneyball," the film adaptation of Michael Lewis' best-selling book.

Shapiro was not blindsided by the movie. To the contrary.

"They sent me the script before they started filming and asked what I thought," Shapiro said. "I told them that parts of it are fiction. But I really didn't care. It's a movie. I figured, what's the use? They are going to make the movie the way they want to make it, anyway."

In one of the early scenes of the movie, Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt, visits the Indians' offices early in the 2002 season. Pitt is there to discuss with Shapiro, then the Tribe's general manager, a potential trade for reliever Ricardo Rincon.

That scene alone is loaded with fiction. For starters, general managers don't fly from city to city to discuss potential trades with other teams. Anybody heard of cell phones?

Pitt enters the office of Shapiro, who is played by Reed Diamond — Shapiro said he had no input on that choice — to talk about a possible trade for Rincon. Also in the office are about seven or eight other members of the front office, none of whom, Shapiro said, would be present for such a meeting, had such a meeting taken place, which it didn't.

One of those in the office in the scene is actor Jonah Hill, who is playing Shapiro's assistant GM at the time, Paul DePodesta, who is the only baseball executive in the movie not identified by his real name. The DePodesta character is named Peter Brand.

Beane is intrigued by Brand's knowledge in the meeting, and following it, Beane wanders through the Indians' offices — another absurdity, since a rival GM would never be allowed to snoop around the executive offices of another big-league team — until he finds Brand's cubicle and, eventually, hires him to work for the A's. Continued...

"Billy Beane has never set foot in our offices in his life," Shapiro said. "And I was not the general manager when (Beane hired DePodesta). That happened two years before I became general manager."

In another scene later in the movie, Beane is in his office, still desperately trying to acquire Rincon, as he juggles phone calls with Shapiro and Giants GM Brian Sabean. In the scene, Shapiro tells Beane he has another team interested in Rincon. Beane and DePodesta instantly deduce it's the Giants.

Beane calls Sabean and in 30 seconds gets Sabean to agree to take an unwanted lefty reliever from Oakland. Then Beane goes back to Shapiro on the other line and completes the Rincon trade. Two trades orchestrated in about 90 seconds.

More Funnyball fiction.

"Trades are not done in two minutes," Shapiro said. "Trades take a long time, sometimes days and weeks, to complete."

The Rincon trade was one of the last ones made by the Indians during the in-season 2002 gutting of the roster, which began with the Bartolo Colon trade with Montreal.

"When we made the Rincon trade, we had already done the Colon trade and the (Chuck) Finley trade," Shapiro said. "I told Chris (Antonetti), we can't afford to carry a middle reliever (Rincon) making $1.7 million. So we were just looking to dump him. It was a salary dump. Chris and I literally joked about being able to find a team to take him, and the only team interested was Oakland."

Historical inaccuracies aside, Shapiro said overall he liked the movie.

"I think it was well made, and I thought Brad Pitt was scary good as Billy Beane. He was unbelievable," Shapiro said.

The theme of "Moneyball" is Beane's decision in 2002 to construct his team using advanced metrics and statistical analysis as a way for smaller-market teams to compete with the sport's mega-payroll superpowers. Continued...

It was a philosophy that at the time had merit because, Shapiro said, "It caused the industry to examine the way we were doing things, and that there might be better ways to evaluate players."

Shapiro remembers the exact moment he began to see value in some of the Moneyball principles.

"It was after I traded Robbie Alomar to the Mets (for Matt Lawton and a handful of prospects)," he said. "I decided then that we needed to look more closely at how we made decisions."

Ironically, Moneyball's attempt to reinvent the wheel through statistical analysis is already, in Shapiro's opinion, out of date.

"Even if you have the best statistical analysis out there, you're not going to be able to close the gap on some of the teams that have payrolls two and three times the size of the average team," he said.

Shapiro said the Indians use a combination of objective (statistics) and subjective (scouts) analysis to make their baseball decisions.

That seismic shift occurred around 2002, but many of the details of it, as shown in the movie "Moneyball," are shaky.

"It is not," Shapiro said, "an accurate depiction of how we do our jobs."

JIngraham@News-Herald.com

Victor Martinez Likely Out For Season With Torn ACL

By Tim Dierkes [January 17 at 2:24pm CST]

Catcher/designated hitter Victor Martinez suffered a torn ACL in his left knee during his off-season conditioning last week, according to the Tigers. Surgery is anticipated, which the Tigers say would cost Martinez the 2012 season.

The Tigers are holding a conference call in about a half hour, at which point we should hear about their plans to replace Martinez after the unfortunate injury.

Would you trade Masterson for Martinez ?

Wow, that is huge news!

Yep most likely puts Detroit in the market for a 1B/DH.

I'm yet to watch Moneyball or read it for that matter apart from a few excerpts I have seen here and there.

I will check the movie out eventually although a few opinions I've read seems to indicate that the impact from the likes of Hudson, Mulder and Zito get ignored presumably because they were drafted.